And the Crows Shall Inherit the Earth
by sobriquelle
Summary: "There is no reward for the faithless," he says, the god of crows & death. "And the faithful?" she asks, teeth clenched. The god's smile is jagged but all-knowing, & she can tell: he is accustomed to being obeyed. "They will never die," he says. And all around them, in the cornfield perched on the world's bleeding edge, the crows begin to sing. [AU Fiddlesticks origin story]
1. Chapter 1

**& the Crows Shall Inherit the Earth**

 **A/N, the explanation: I've written maybe 7 or 8 AU-type origin stories for Fiddlesticks (because he doesn't really have an origin story right now) & I have no idea whether they will generate any interest whatsoever on this site (since they're all totally canon-divergent, more like original stories than fanfiction), BUT there's only one way to find out.**

 **I'm testing the interest level; if you'd be interested in reading the others, say so & I will commit to making them beautiful + post-worthy. Grammar & punctuation mischief is intentional as always; linguistic heresy etc. But I appreciate your reads/reviews anyway, even if they're only to tell me that you hate the way I grind semi-colons to make my bread. Chapter II will be up next week-ish. **

* * *

**I.**

She wakes to a sky undressed; clean and cloudless, a conscious, willing blue.

She wakes to the white-hot terror of sunlight coming in through the windows, stretching out like an unwanted guest across the furniture.

In a ledger, Clare's Keeper of Days will write: _day 16 of the 8_ _th_ _month in the 170_ _th_ _year of record, sunny, no clouds; last night, we buried Shea, daughter of Hadrian & Sybelle, in the dust at the edge of the pines without an offering at the behest of her parents & High Priestess Naomi & god forgive us, there is nothing to offer; today is day 663 without rain;_

And in small, hesitant strokes, thin with weeping: _we are starving to death._

* * *

It takes time to make memories; it takes time to remember.

Her life is 34 years long; her life is one village wide.

She remembers the old well at the center of town, where she drew water to make sweetbreads as a child. The hand-painted signs on the fronts of the tailor's, the baker's, the pub; the bells that rang on entry, each note unique to its home. The cobbled roads; the wall of pines, the sweet cherry trees.

It takes time to remember these things.

And while time is not the only thing scarce inside the box of Naomi's reality, it is the thing she can spare the least.

And so she remembers as much and as quickly as she can, but only until her feet touch the road out of the city, with her bag stuffed full and heavy on her shoulders, with the line of people thick behind her, with the blue light of dawn apathetic overhead, and then she says it to herself, audible but as quiet as her voice will allow: "Now go. And forget."

In the village of her birth and life, the statue was the last thing Naomi touched.

At the mouth of the temple, her bags packed, her body poised to walk all the miles it would need to walk for as long as it needed to walk them, she ran her finger down the crack in the red clay between its eyes.

Meek and crumbling, the face of their god broke beneath her hand.

* * *

Their first night on the road fell like a sigh.

Fifty-four women, thirty-seven men, twenty-two children, four sheep , six dogs, and five chickens (the latter crowded into one woefully small cage); too tired to be sad, or too sad to be tired, Clare's remnants were camped off the road with their belongings tucked like pillows under whichever body part ached the most: their heads, their knees, their ankles. The children used their parents or each other as pillows, and all but a few were exhausted enough to fall asleep without complaint.

And Naomi would've spent that first night alone and restless under those strange stars, hours and miles away from home, but as she concentrated on the collective sound of their sleeping, as she willed herself to _go and forget_ , Valhayana found her.

"I knew you wouldn't sleep," the other woman said. Naomi met her eyes, which burned like shards of warm terracotta even in the dark, and she moved to make room for her on her blanket, but Valhayana ignored the gesture, laid herself out across the dead grass, which crunched beneath the weight of her legs.

For several minutes, the rustle of Valhayana's shifting was the only sound; neither woman could come up with the right words to break the uneasy silence.

And then Valhayana asked: "How far, do you think?"

Naomi, who had known her forever, made an empty sound, lifted one shoulder in uncertainty. Valla knew; they all knew: this was uncharted, the land beyond the drought, if such a place existed at all.

"Rain or death," Naomi said, naming their destination for the first time.

And then she waited, listened for Valla's response; she needed it.

But Valla said nothing, and the black night spread out above them, vast and merciless.

* * *

Long before the drought, there was a river: Issan.

A long, blue thread at the heart of the wood that hugged the village Clare, it was named for someone that no one living was old enough to remember. A woman? A man? A savior? A martyr? No one knew.

But Naomi spent half her childhood there on the muddy banks of that river in the days before water was scarce, before Issan's slow, undignified death under the sun. She and Valla spent every season but one on its banks before then, before rain was only a memory, and before their love was a muted, unspoken thing.

In spring, they picked sweet cherries and nibbled them while the river whispered between their toes. In summer, they hunted for pebbles in the thick muck of the shoreline. And in the autumn, the season of colors, they had nothing to do but bask in the shade of the evergreens and enjoy each other's company.

It was autumn that Naomi thought of on the fortieth day of their journey: the autumn that she was 15, the autumn that Valla was 13, the autumn they ran down the bank of the river as they had so many times before, the autumn the gold-backed snake came up from the brush and sunk its teeth deep into the muscle of Valla's calf.

Naomi had never seen one, and she saw that one only in passing, only in the midst of its retreat, when blood and poison dripped sticky like berry juice down Valla's ankle and the wail of her surprise shook the birds from the trees. Naomi saw it slip away like a thief back through the brush, but then her eyes were drawn and locked on her friend.

"The poison…" Valla's voice was calm, unworried. "Will I die?"

But Naomi had already wondered the same.

She cradled Valla in arms like stone, carried her past the pebbles and the evergreens, up the riverbank and straight into Doc Samuel's clinic.

And then she ran.

She wept, and she ran all the way back to that place they'd left, once-sacred, with Valla's blood still wet on the canvas of her arm. Like fists on a war drum, her pulse in her ears; she imagined it with her own fists clenched tight, imagined holding the writhing rope of the snake between her hands and pulling, tearing, ripping.

She looked for the traitorous thing; for better or worse, Naomi was too angry to be afraid.

But though they had done it no harm, the snake was still afraid, and it quickly became clear to her that she would never find it.

It was dusk before her bravery returned, before the panic fled her and she wandered back up onto the cobbled road. There were no lights in the clinic's windows; it was closed for the night.

So her legs carried her, trembling, to Valla's house, where the lights were on. And through the glass, Naomi peered without breathing, to find Valla stretched out in a chair by the fireplace, ankle wrapped and elevated. There was a book in her hands, but the warm circles of her eyes were trained on the window.

And nothing could have taught her better than that day by the river: how unwise it was to let something be so precious, so irreplaceable; how dangerous it was to love.

She learned when to save; she learned when to sever.

On the fortieth night, she was thinking of this instead of sleeping. It began as a longing: for a no-more home, for a no-more bed, for the no-more kettle on the no-more hearth; for anything not foreign but familiar.

 _Go now. And forget._

And as it bloomed in her chest, the wide, terrible shape of grief, she severed it, cut it, crushed it. Forget. _Forget_.

And on the cusp of her own command, she heard it: the first grand sweep of thunder, rolling sweet as a lover's tongue across the night sky. She saw as much as felt it: the white-violet stitch of lightning over the hilltops.

Her breath stopped, caught in her throat.

One drop, two, three—in seconds, they were countless.

Tears; rain. On her face, they were one and the same.

She took a breath, intending to yell, to wake the others, but they were stirring already under the torrent, singing, crying, embracing the sopping wet of each other's bodies. She listened to them without joining them, watched the moving shapes of them against the starless backdrop of the night.

But she thanked no one.

And when Valla was beside her again, smiling, Naomi held herself still, did not embrace her.

"We're past the deadlands," the other woman said. And then like a child, she stuck her tongue out, tasted the rain.

Naomi looked out over them, the ones she'd known since she was a child, the ones she'd known since they were born. She looked out over them, and then she looked back to Valla. "Forty days," she said. And when Valla looked at her, quizzically, she said, "you asked me how long."

"Forty days," Valla repeated, nodding.

The following morning, streaked with mud and the salt of their own tears, they danced down the road to the music of the storm, the remnants of the village of Clare.

* * *

It rained for three days.

On the first night, it rained with the banked-up, haphazard vengeance of a scorned lover.

On the second night, it rained with painstaking calculation, steady and predictable.

On the third night and the day that followed, it was more mist than rain, more intimate; like an old friend returned from war.

They were soaked to their skin and bones, all of them, by the time they reached the wet husk of the village. Being low on the road, they could see it for miles, rising soggy and obsolete at the top of the hill; it beckoned them, the promise of quarter, of rest, of dry feet.

And they had no idea, no means of knowing it was abandoned until they followed the road up into its throat, walked the path straight up between homes without kettles or families or fires.

By then, they were cold. They loved the rain and all its dripping promise, but they wanted warm food and dry socks.

Quiet as a graveyard, the village offered them nothing but the kinds of questions that rise up naturally from the landscape in hollow places like it: who lived here, and how long ago? Where did they go? And more importantly: why?

Naomi could feel their eyes upon her as she reached up to touch the overhang of a roof. A wet piece of it fell off into her hand, and she ran her thumb over the ridged length of it. The material, whatever it was, was like a marriage between tough paper and silk-soft tree bark; she had not seen anything quite like it.

The rest of the structure was simply made: unpainted wood planks, glass windows. There was no sign on the door, nothing to indicate what type of place it once was. She leaned in to look, but the windows were dusty on the inside and wet on the outside, and the room itself was too dark; she could tell by instinct that the shelter was abandoned, but she could determine very little else.

When she turned back, Valla was peering with interest at the yellow-white paper in her hand. "What is that?" she asked.

Naomi frowned. "I don't know." And she patted herself to find an empty pocket, stuffed the paper-bark into it. Behind her, people began a nervous conversation. The words "abandoned" and "cursed" and "cold" rose up from it like smoke.

"Could it be a sign?" Valla asks. "Fortune smiling on us?"

And Naomi remembered the statue of their former god, the one that broke under her palm the day they left the village of Clare. She looked out over them again, her flock; orphaned by their god, gathered up like fabric on the streets of someplace as lost and forgotten as they were.

She wanted to be hopeful, and so she refused to be.

"A sign from who?" she asked, piercing Valla with her gaze. And then she added, "for all we know, they may have left for a similar reason as we did. There may be nothing here to sustain us."

The wind picked up, but Valla's brown-black hair was too wet to be lifted. She regarded Naomi thoughtfully. "There's only one way to be sure."

Naomi sighed, considering. "How many mouths and how many families?" she asked.

"My last count was at 68," Valla answered. "Mouths," she added. "Not families."

There was a silence between them as both women grieved that low, low number.

And Naomi forced herself to decide.

"It'll be night soon," Naomi said. "Count the houses. Open them, by force if necessary. If there's anything to salvage, take an inventory. We'll stay the night here." She wiped her hand across the glass window, reshaping the raindrops. "There are beds, if nothing else. And hearths." Their blankets were wet, but even a bed without a blanket would rest them better than the dry grass.

"But…do you think we'll _stay_?" Valla asked, and the desperation in her voice was so shameless it was nearly vulgar.

But Naomi would not let herself be swayed by anything but evidence and good sense.

"I don't know," she answered. "And I can't know. Until we know why _they_ left."


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: No spoilers, but…He's here.**

* * *

 **II.**

In the cluttered caverns of those homes, they found wool coats, well-threaded; bottles of fragrance, leather shoes, tools and colorful children's toys. In one home: stack after stack of charcoal drawings on fine, fragrant paper, which they smeared, at first, with their careless thumbs.

"Look here!" yelled Penelope, and draped heavy across her arms was a quilt beautiful enough to steal their breath.

Having heard tales of plagues that could wipe out generations in a matter of weeks, they checked the bed-linens for bloodstains, checked the cupboards for tinctures of Skullcap and Burdock, herbs poisonous enough to kill everything but the body itself. And when they located the village clinic, Valla took it upon herself to inspect it thoroughly, for in the absence of Clare's former doctor, she knew well that the domain would be hers. She found it clean and well-stocked; analgesic, antiseptic, drawers full of bandages and unblemished tools.

Food was evident; it was everywhere.

Left to their own whims, the wild herbs and vegetables had outgrown the patches of tilled earth meant to contain them and spilled out from the gardens onto the road. Tomatoes and wild onions, bright orange peppers, silk-smooth red and yellow grains born out of bright green husks, which no one among them had seen or tasted and for which they had no name.

It was plentiful, all of it, but especially the latter; a half-mile from the village, there was a field of those same tall, vibrant stalks, enough to twice-fill the belly of every empty basket they'd found.

"They hang them from the roofs," Hadrian said, pulling husk away from flesh, thumbing the rounded ridges of the fruit-grain. "To collect rainwater, maybe?"

And they began to recognize this unifying material elsewhere: the hair of dolls, the weave of baskets, the rope of garlands, the stuffing of pillows.

With the happy creak of each cupboard door, the remnants of Clare felt less and less like scavengers and more like citizens of that place. The items they touched became theirs; they woke from the beds that cradled them, greeted the daylight smiling.

But among the things they found, there was one thing missing from the drawers and cabinets and shelves of those homes: records.

None of births or deaths or injuries, none of marriages, none of disputes or settlements, none of taxes or monies paid or trade agreements.

And it would have remained a mystery had Ovid not observed: "But there are no books, either." He looked around those assembled in the street, waiting to be contradicted. "So they didn't read, they didn't write; I think, perhaps, that they didn't know how."

It was hard to believe; impossible, even. But considering the treasures they left behind, it was harder to imagine the villagers carrying their records off with them into the wild. And so the history of that place, swelling nameless around them, had simply ceased to exist until they wandered up into its streets.

Born anew in their arms, the village was theirs: to inhabit, to love, to name.

"What do you think?" Valla asked. They were leaned against the fence-post, and the morning sky above them was milk-white, eager with the sweet threat of rain.

As some had already noted, it was bad luck to leave something unnamed. And elated as they were, none had argued: there was power in the ritual, and it was best left in the care of their priestess.

"Leave it to a vote," Naomi said.

"But what choices should I offer them?"

The voice that answered her was blank, uninterested. "Whatever you want."

And for the sentiment that radiated from Clare's priestess, Valla had no name.

* * *

It took Hadrian only a few days to master the quirks of the yellow grain-fruit, which was plentiful enough to accommodate his experiments without fear of wasting it.

He learned to separate it from its husk and ease a knife down behind the bright kernels until they popped off in rows, straight into the boiling kettle. He learned by trial and error how quickly the boiling would steal away the grain-fruit's delicate sweetness and particular crunch. And then he experimented carefully with the wild herbs and grasses, finding which flavors complemented and which insulted, chewing a sprig at a time until he knew their unique chemistries by heart.

By the second week of their inhabitance, his soup did more than ease the ache in their bellies.

"It's his gift," Sybelle said, nudging Valla's shoulder, and to see her face was to forget: these two, these lovers, had buried their only child a few months prior. Valla smiled, but Sybelle was looking again at her husband, joyful for the first time in years.

They were gathered up in a room too small to contain them, eating, laughing. The salty broth satisfied Valla's tongue, and she braved the crowd around the kettle to pour herself another bowl.

And then in the dusk, their bellies full, they spilled out into the streets on the heels of song.

The violin was in the bedroom of the last home on the road, wrapped lovingly in worn but claret velvet, and Mikhail, the old sailor, took it carefully in his arms, tuned it by ear, played it by heart.

" _As I sat in my form for to view the plains round, I was trembling and shaking in fear of the hounds."_

When they forgot the words, they laughed instead. And Valla was laughing her way through the song's next verse when she saw Naomi slip through the crowd and vanish past the wooden gate on the outskirts of the village.

 _Don't follow her._

For once, it seemed, her head and her heart agreed.

The words of the chorus came to her in the earthy richness of Ovid's baritone. " _To my hark, tallyho! Hark over yon brow, 'she's over,' cried the huntsman, 'see yonder she'll go."_

A verse later, her eyes hadn't moved.

And as music loosened the sash on the misery in her bones, an urgency overwhelmed her, carried her through Naomi's wake and off into the twilight.

* * *

Valla did nothing to hide her approach.

And Naomi's only response was to mutter, half-hearted, "you're missing the music."

"I can hear it," Valla answered quickly. Sure enough, the notes drifted down to them, soft as wings in the night wind, a song whose words Valla remembered, and she felt instantly sorry to be missing it, instantly desperate to name what perversion that had dragged her away. When Naomi offered no response, Valla filled the void with, "I think they've decided on _Rhone_."

"What?" Still, she didn't bother to turn.

"Rhone," Valla repeated, and the round word felt sharp, pointed, between her teeth. "For the village name. Mikhail suggested it, didn't explain where it came from." She paused, deliberately, to let the words soften in the heat of her mouth. "It's what they want, unless you have an objection," she said, finally.

Another vexing moment, and then, "No," from Naomi. "I don't care."

And it was too much, suddenly; the apathy, the distance. "There are a hundred reasons to be happy right now." Valla heard it in her voice, the slow-boil bubbling of anger. "You're the only person who can't seem to find a single one."

Those last words had flown from her with the intent to harm, and she felt what harm they did when Naomi turned, fixed her in a scathing gaze. "And I'm the only one who's bothered to ask why an entire village of people would vanish without a trace. Without their belongings," she said, turning her body fully, and then, "no, without things useful to them, _precious_ to them. Drawings, instruments, tools, toys." With each thing she named, she struck her palm with a counting finger.

" _You_ know this because _we've_ _looked_ ," Valla said. "While you sulked in the eaves, we've spent our days _looking_ for a story, but there's none to see. Our only hope is to wait for their return, to ask them."

"They won't return."

"I wasn't being serio—"

"This is an omen. You know it without wanting to admi—"

"An omen?" Valla snapped. "An _omen_?"

And Naomi only watched her, lips pressed into a line.

"It was an _omen_ when the rain stopped, when the fields, our crops, wilted and died, and the river Issan dried up under our feet. This?" she asked, gesturing. "This is not an omen, Naomi." The landscape of her voice had changed from angry to pleading. "There is no god here, no one to write us an omen. It's only us here. Do you hear me?" she asked. "Only us."

Naomi closed her eyes, gripped her head in a trembling hand. "Please leave," she said, and all the fight was gone from her. "I came here to be alone, to think. I didn't ask you to follow me."

"You didn't have to ask." And instead of apologizing for spilling Naomi's pain out between them, she said, "tell me, please. What's happened to you?"

"Nothing's happened to me that hasn't happened to everyone else."

"No," Valla answered. "No, everyone else is attempting to heal, Naomi, and you're clawing the wound."

And Naomi looked at her then like she'd sprouted wings and threatened flight. "Someone stumbles into your clinic with a severed hand," she said, "would you call that a wound?"

"Call it what you want, but tell me what it _is_."

But Naomi was silent, and Valla could tell by her posture that she would say no more.

"Come back with me," Valla said. Like loving arms, the music beckoned.

"No." The single word cut the air between them like a knife.

And unwilling to suffer another moment, Valla took her skirt in her hands, turned towards the song, turned to make her way back down the road. But with the syllable of Naomi's blade still deep in her back, she turned back again, said, "you know where I'll be."

"I—"

But before Naomi could begin the thought, a screaming rose up out of the grain-field.

And following it, opening like a door in the sky, the long, moving cloud of crows.

Transfixed, Valla could only watch them, the black mass of them, spreading and writhing in the dead space above the field before vanishing, miles-off, into the pine woods at the field's far edge.

"Why…" But they screamed again in the distance, and she forgot.

"I've never seen so many birds," Naomi said.

"No," Valla agreed. Her progress halted, she could do nothing but stand, skirts in hand, mouth agape, waiting. "Not all at once. Not like that."

The night had absorbed all but the dampest, bluest light.

When they were children, she and Naomi would wander home, hand-in-hand, in the blue evening-time, their knees and elbows scraped from tree-climbing, their hearts raw and racing from truth-telling. Unexpected, the memory compelled her forward again, back to Naomi's side. And when the other woman moved suddenly towards the grain-field, Valla's hand came up on instinct, locked itself tight around her wrist.

"What are you doing?" Valla demanded. The village lanterns drew orange lines in the acorn-brown of Naomi's eyes.

"There's something in the field."

Valla frowned. "They're carrion birds…"

"They're scavengers," Naomi corrected. "They weren't feeding, not that many. What carcass could feed so many at once?"

Naomi began to walk, and instead of letting go, instead of releasing her grip around Naomi's wrist, Valla stumbled along behind her.

"It'll be dark soon," she reasoned.

But without slowing, Naomi said, "it's not that far."

And their long skirts trailed, storm-grey, through the tall grass.

* * *

Only when she had to, only when she needed both hands to brush aside the towering grain-stalks that tangled in her clothes and her long hair, only then did Valla let go of Naomi.

And when they emerged from the arms of the field, when they spilled out from the whisper of stems and leaves into the clearing, Valla froze at its edge like she was carved there.

He rose up precious and sinister before their eyes: the wooden man.

Haphazard; as if, she thought, he'd been put together in haste. His arms and legs were secured at their joints with the husks of the grain-fruit, and his face, the textured grey cloth of it, was starched to open wide the jagged cut of his mouth.

His eyes were empty; his eyes were holes.

And he was dressed in a long garment, plain, robe-like. The stitches were coarse.

Naomi approached him, curious and fearless, as was her way. And as Valla followed the woman with her eyes, she could not help but notice it there in the darkness, resting in the scorched earth beneath the wooden man's feet: a charred-black skull.

Human.

He was an idol, this creature of fabric and wood. And in the silence that spread out between them, thick and dark as honey, neither woman had any reason to question why the other villagers had left.

But Naomi's sob struck her like a fist.

Because Naomi didn't cry.

And the sounds that fell from her throat were constricted, visceral. Before their troubled past could write a more reasonable response, Valla closed the space between them, closed her arms around Naomi's body. "Don't," she whispered.

"I told you," she sobbed. "Valla, I told you. He left them." Naomi pulled away, palming the wetness on her cheeks. "They left here for the same reason that we left Clare. This place is godless, unguarded. It's _unsafe_."

And for the second time that night, she felt an ache, tangible, in the story of her bones.

Naomi was something Valla had lost long before the drought. But it was there between the lines, it was there unspoken, the possibility: that Naomi was something she could find again in this new life. And on the heels of that thought, she reached out, took Naomi's hands, kissed each of Naomi's palms in turn, petal-soft. "So we'll be godless," Valla said.

"No." But it was weak this time, half-hearted.

"Why?"

"After all we've been through," Naomi said. "You've seen what life is like without them."

Valla took a deep breath. "You devoted your life to that principle," she said. "And I…" She paused, shook her head. "I never understood. _Never_." She felt her own tears then, warm on her cheeks. "But you aren't a priestess anymore, and your life is _your_ life. And if we die godless, then—"

"Stop it."

"—if we die godless, then at least we'll die having _lived_. In something besides _fear_ , Naomi."

"But that's what they do," Naomi said. "They keep us from being afraid. They're our guardians—"

"There was no one guarding us on that road!" Valla snapped. And then, softer, "forty days, forty nights, no one guarded us. _No one._ Now we're here." And Valla took Naomi's face in her hands, held steady her gaze. "And if no one is guarding us here," she said, slowly, deliberately, "then so be it."

And the last tears that fell from Naomi's eyes dried on the tips of Valla's thumbs.

* * *

 _The village lanterns were all aglow by the time the women emerged again from the grain-field._

 _When it came like an ink-drip from the starless void of the night sky, landed on the fence-post to watch them with eyes like burned coins, Valla squeezed Naomi's hand a little tighter._

 _And when the crow drifted like black smoke back to the field, back to the splintered shoulder of its god, none could bear witness, for the village of Rhone was dancing, burning, in the home-fire of their song._

 _The light that became his eyes was ripe, clear, verdant; the fever-green of climbing ivy._

 _And it wasn't the wind that shook the golden cornfield when the moon was high in the sky and the villagers of Rhone fell exhausted into stolen beds._

 _It was the dark, rustling prayer of a thousand beating wings._

* * *

 **So I basically love this story like crazy. I made this mythology with my heartstrings & can barely contain myself. If you've read Heavensent, you know: I love to play with the "scarecrow as guardian" idea. Fiddle is here & it's about to get real. **


	3. Chapter 3

**III.**

 **A/N: My stories don't usually get a ton of reviews, so every single one I get literally makes my day. I appreciate your praise SO MUCH & I hope this story continues to satisfy. It's taking longer to edit than I thought; I've reworked it from my original idea to make it more compatible with the Fiddlesticks we meet (& loved) in Heavensent, who seems resigned to his own wickedness even as Soraka comes to love him for being so much more. Sorry for the delay between chapters; the story will be better for it. I still expect to finish this within the next few weeks.**

* * *

In the weeks that followed her weeping confession at the grain-field's heart, Naomi struggled to navigate the wide, empty space that had become her day-to-day.

That evening was their secret, hers and Valla's, for reasons that included the wooden idol and his patch of charred earth and the skull of sacrifice that lay half-buried between his feet, but for others as well. That Valla had seen Naomi broken and sobbing: it was only theirs to know.

And that there was a god, once, of the place that became their home, that his idol was inanimate and untended in a cage of tall, tangled grass: it, too, was only theirs to know. The village of Rhone served no god; the village of Rhone had no need of one, Valla had decided, and Naomi had agreed, if only because there was no god to serve, and because Valla's palms on her cheeks had outlasted each one of her tears.

But Naomi had taken her oath at 19 years old, joined the priesthood as a young, young woman. And the easy habits of praying and fasting, accepting offerings, acting as a conduit between the villagers and their patron guardian weren't so easy to rinse from her life.

As a citizen of Rhone, she rose in the morning, she slept through the night; in her other hours, without a temple, without an altar, she floated between people, between homes, between small and insignificant tasks.

Aimless, unused.

"There's just not enough work for two people, I'm afraid," Hadrian had said, and the others only echoed his sentiment, one by one. "Don't you want your time? For yourself?"

Imagining themselves chained by the demands of priesthood, the vows, the solitude, they were eager to send her away. "Leave this to me," they said, and that was that.

Until Valla.

Whose response to the questions, "is there anything I can do for you? Can I help you in your work?" was to hold out a basket, empty as the days were long, and without hesitating, say, "there's an entire field of wild herbs growing along the village border. I need as many as you can carry."

Their fingers brushed as the basket changed hands. "But I wouldn't know what's useful to you and what isn't."

"It's _your_ job to gather them," Valla said, "and _my_ job to use them." Smiling, in that no-nonsense way that she did.

And Naomi thought of Valla's smile as she wandered down the hillside, as she plucked the tender stems from plants not withered and hopeless with thirst and filled the husk-basket with all their varying shades of green, as she tramped her way back through the tall grass and back through the clinic's front door.

Valla was leaned over the kettle when Naomi returned, poised at the hearth with a wooden ladle and a look of concentration. She'd tied her hair away from her face, secured it with a bright red ribbon.

"I got a little of everything," Naomi said.

"Can you bring me the solimory?" Valla asked without turning from the pot.

Naomi frowned down into the basket, wordless.

"Just bring the basket," Valla said, glancing wryly over her shoulder.

Naomi set the basket on the counter, and Valla emptied it deftly, first separating the herbs by type and then separating leaves from stems. She tore the leaves; she snapped the stems. And then with interest, Naomi watched her scoop an entire stack into her hand, dump it into the pot.

"I have to make a tea," she explained, and she dusted her palm over the kettle, swept away the leaf fragments that clung to it.

"For what?"

"Sybelle," she said. And then, with a sigh, "she's expecting."

Naomi laughed first, and then arched a brow at the near-full kettle. "That's a lot of tea," she noted. The warm, earthy smell of the solimory began to fill the room.

"Yes it is," Valla agreed. She gave the kettle a stir with the wooden ladle, stared blankly into the swirling leaves. "It's only a matter of time before there are others."

Malnutrition, despair, uncertainty; for years, the families of Clare were both unwilling and unable to have children. Rhone's youngest citizen was 10 years old.

"Times are good," Naomi said, and the words filled her with something bright, with a feeling like waking from a long illness, fever-free and alive, into the rest of her life. "How long does it take?" she asked. "The tea?"

Valla's eyes were streaked with the firelight. "Hours," she said.

Between them, the word melted. And there was no sound but their waiting, charged and heated, until the quiet creak of the door turned them both where they stood.

"I'm sorry…" Leda said quickly, the way people do when they can tell they've entered into something that was perfect without them. "There's something wrong." She had her daughter clutched by the shoulders in front of her, 11 year old Penelope.

"What's the trouble?" Valla asked them, mother and daughter. But she gave Naomi's hand a hidden squeeze before she patted the broad oak table at the room's center.

The girl was old enough to climb onto the table herself, but Leda lifted her daughter beneath the arms, hoisted her body up onto it and then stared into her eyes with a severity that seemed unnecessary. "Penny," she said, and her hands came up to the young girl's shoulders again. "Will you _please_ tell Valhayana what's wrong?"

And as a moment of tension unfolded, palpable, between the woman and her daughter, Naomi and Valla exchanged a glance. Leda stepped aside as Valla neared the table, and Penelope's eyes, blue as water and mourning, moved to focus on the woman who wasn't her mother. "You can tell me," Valla said. "What's wrong?"

In the silence, Leda wrung her hands.

"You don't want to say?" Valla asked, and her voice had gone sweet, the way a voice will, naturally, when comforting a bewildered child. "You won't be in trouble if you tell the truth."

"She's not telling lies," Leda said, and her voice was loose, fluttering like clothes on a line with a fear she was trying hard to contain. "She won't speak at all, not even to lie."

Valla looked from mother to daughter, frowning. "That's not like you," Valla said to the child, who she'd known since the day of her birth, and Naomi agreed without saying so. "Does anything hurt?" Valla asked her.

Penelope shook her head.

"Nothing? Not here?" Valla touched her own neck at the throat. "Or here, when you breathe?" She circled her hand over her chest and took a deep breath, expanding her lungs beneath the scaffold of her bones.

Another head-shake from Penelope.

"Can you do this?" Valla opened her mouth wide, stuck her tongue out with a brief but dramatic, " _ahhhh_."

Penelope mimicked the action, but it was soundless. And Valla took the girl's chin gently between her thumb and forefinger, tilted her face in the direction of the firelight and peered into her mouth. "You can close," Valla said after a moment, but she kept the girl's face in her hand, eyed her intently. "Can we agree that it's wrong to scare your mother for the sake of a game? Or a dare?"

Without hesitation, the child nodded. She was not, in Naomi's memory, the troublesome type.

And then Valla let go of her small face, leaned in. There was a knowing glance exchanged between doctor and patient, and then quiet, so quiet, "do you believe," Valla began, "that you're safe here?"

Naomi barely heard it; Valla's whisper was intended for her patient alone. But the room was quiet, and when Naomi looked to Leda, to the woman who had named this child and had vowed to love her from the moment she entered into the suffering world, there was something worse than fear written across her face.

It was an expression Naomi recognized; it was an expression she'd made on the worst day of her life.

"Excuse me," Naomi said, and the door mocked her exit with a creak.

Outside, the world glistened. A light rain had fallen, and drops still fell, scant as tears, from the husks of the roof into the clay jars gathered in the grass below.

When Penelope emerged from the clinic, Naomi hardly noticed her. So caught up in the act of forgetting, she noticed them only as they left, hand-in-hand, mother and daughter, off down the main road towards home without a word. When they disappeared from sight, she wandered back into the clinic.

And the clinic's patron saint was attending her tea again, stirring and stirring. "Did she say anything to you?" she asked. "When they left?"

"No. Did she say anything to _you_?"

"No, but there's nothing wrong with her," Valla said. She set the ladle nearby the kettle, dried her hands on her skirt. "Not medically."

Naomi crossed her arms, said what she knew they both were thinking. "A late-blooming reaction to stress."

"Imagine if we'd been through what they've been through," Valla said. "When we were young."

Naomi's lips trembled with the outline of her words before she could bring herself to say them. "We're still young," she said finally. "Aren't we?"

It was back like lightning between them; the charge, the heat.

And Valla's mouth tasted like the smell of solimory, like the memory of dawn-time prayer.

* * *

She was sitting and idle again hours later, lost in thought in the rocker by the window of her house, when the same woman, the one who entered her every thought without invitation, entered her home like a whirlwind, slinging the door so hard it rattled the building around them.

And as she opened and plundered the home's every drawer, every cabinet, Naomi could only watch her, baffled.

"Valla?" Naomi tried, but the sound of her voice was drowned out by the clatter of trinkets hitting the floor. "Valla!" she tried again, and she put her hand tentatively on the frantic woman's shoulder.

"Ink, I need ink," Valla said. Her arms were mired deep in the contents of a trunk, wool blankets, threadbare sheets. She pulled the linens out in a heap, dumped them onto the floor.

"We never found any ink," Naomi said carefully.

"Something, anything," Valla stammered. Her earth-brown eyes were wide with panic. "Paint, or...or charcoal."

"Something to write with?" Naomi offered.

"Yes, anything."

And a dark shape began to form in her chest, began to knot itself around her heart. "Why?"

* * *

They were thinner, more ghostly, the last time they'd gathered themselves up in the streets.

Back then, the village was only a nameless place, and they were rain-drenched strangers who'd showed up with nothing but memories and hope and the shirts on their backs.

Naomi looked out over the assembled, counted them without meaning to; some were half-there, poised in the gaping mouths of doorways, leaned on door-frames with crossed arms, but there was not a face absent from the crowd.

Leda was still wringing her hands.

"A game," Valla began, addressing the children lined up before her, "ceases to be a game when it hurts or worries your family or your friends." Eight sets of eyes watched her closely, eight faces turned up to her, followed her as she paced. "And this lie has gone on long enough," she said.

There were frowns among the non-parents, among the villagers who knew and loved these children as well as their parents but who had, no doubt, spent the day absorbed in work. Some of them, it seemed, had no idea why the village doctor had called a town meeting in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

"Whose idea was it?" Valla asked. "This dare?"

But it was only the wind that answered.

"There is no punishment for telling the truth," Valla tried, her voice unsteady. "Speak now, tell the truth, and no one will be punished."

Penelope twisted her hands in her skirt. The oldest among the children, 15 year old Michael, regarded Valla with uncertainty.

And Naomi was stunned that no one saw it, stunned that the villagers of Rhone couldn't recognize an emotion that had greeted them so often in those years they'd only barely survived.

But Naomi could see it.

The children collected before her were terrified.

"There's no punishment now, but there may be later," Mikhail chimed in behind them. "Unless someone confesses. Whose trick was it?"

And as the questions hung there, unanswered, the darkness in Naomi's chest spread like an oil-stain.

There were tears on Penelope's face, but when the young girl's face wrenched in a sob, it was only a breath that left her, air without noise.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Naomi asked suddenly, and all eyes shifted to her. She stepped forward, faced the children. "When you realized you couldn't speak, what was the last thing you saw? Or said? Write it on the earth," she continued, kneeling, "like this." And Naomi dragged the tip of her index finger through the soft dirt, wrote out " _naomi_ " in swift, easy lines.

There was a wave of hesitancy among the children, like a cloud passing dark across the sun, and for a moment, for one sweet moment, Naomi thought she'd caught them in their collective lie.

But then they knelt, one by one, and it didn't take them long to scrawl it there in the dirt, to write that chorus in a jagged landscape across the village's main road.

Eight times, the ground said it.

" _Crow_."

And beside her, beholding it, Valla was still as ice.

* * *

In her mind, the memory was clean: the crows, rising like a cloud into the dusk, screaming, drawing them out into the grain-field on a blue, blue evening.

And she half-expected to see them again when she and Valla reached the fence-post at the edge of town, but it was only the field, green and honey-gold, stretched out under the cloudless sky.

"Stay here," Naomi told her.

But Valla caught her arm before she could move, before she could walk away. "You're going alone," she said. "Why?"

Naomi met her eyes. "You know why," she said. "It's my job to gather the herbs, it's your job to use them."

And when Valla didn't respond, Naomi followed the path down the hill, down into the field, opened her way through the stalks until she emerged from their tangling into the clearing at the center and stepped into the evergreen of a light that had not existed when she and Valla were there before.

Before, his eyes were dark, hollow.

But when she looked on them now, they were filled with a hue like willow leaves, which licked and danced like flame.

She folded her skirt up under her knees and knelt before him, outside the circle of scorched earth, away from the skull at his feet.

"You have my attention," she told him, the idol of the nameless god who'd muted and frightened their children. He rose up tall before her eyes, carved and poised, splintered and tilted. "I represent my people," she said. "And we would like to know how we should serve you."

But Naomi didn't get the answer she expected.

The god, in fact, was silent. And the crows, for whatever purpose they served him, were nowhere to be found.

She stayed there for hours in the green river of his gaze, until the sun dipped and the night descended, until his light was the only light.

She stayed there listening to the sound of her breathing and the earth's, the low wind's echo, waiting and waiting.

For all the words he never said.

* * *

There was firelight in her window when she returned from the field.

And Naomi wasn't at all surprised to find Valla in the rocker by the window, wide-awake and anxious, when she entered her house at the darkest hour of night.

"He hasn't left, has he?" She asked it before the door was even shut, before Naomi was all the way inside the house.

And Naomi sighed, vexed and weary. "He's still here." Under Valla's scrutiny, she pulled off her boots and stockings, set them near the hearth.

"What does he require of us?"

But instead of admitting that he hadn't told her, that he hadn't spoken to her at all, Naomi only said, "I don't know yet." And then she palmed her forehead, climbed, aching, into the small bed at the opposite side of the room.

Valla stood there, hesitating. "You're tired," she muttered.

"Yes," Naomi said. And then, simply, "stay."

Valla climbed into bed beside her, the scent of herbs and earth, of myth and moor.

Neither woman slept; both were silent.

Because Naomi didn't have the heart to tell her what tomorrow would bring.


End file.
